Dionysus was nowhere in sight.
'What do we do now?' Kevin asked. 'Wait for him show?'
'We find him,' Penelope said.
They started walking along the shore of the lake towa the huts. The water was dirty, brown, polluted not oalji with bodies but with the wreckage of boats. The mi smelled of sewage.
Kevin gagged, plugged his nose.
The plants were no longer as brightly spectacular they had been on the climb up. They were still strange! but the colors seemed off, the bold designs closer to mutations than miracles. It was as if the closer they came the center of the wheel, the closer they got to the god, more things seemed as though they were beginning to unravel.
They trudged silently through the sludge until thej reached the small assemblage of makeshift structures! Here, bodies were not only floating in the water, the^ were buried in the mud, stiffened arms acting as post' supporting the bottoms of plywood walls. The stagna air seemed unusually heavy, the atmosphere forbidding*!
What had happened? It had not been like this whe she'd seen Dionysus before. Then the atmosphere been festive, seductively hedonistic, the opposite of dour oppressiveness. Was he spreading himself too Was he losing his power because of some inner strugj gle? Was he simply too drunk and dissipated to functie properly?
Or had he intended his new Olympus to look like this? No, she didn't think so. She walked forward slowl^f The huts were all small, six feet high at the most, the of storage sheds. One of them had a facade that looked like a smaller version of the Parthenon--the plywood and . tree branches metamorphosed into white marble--but the attempt was halfhearted, and there had been no similar effort made with the other structures.
Penelope stepped around a naked leg protruding from the mud and looked inside the open entrance of the first hut.
Mother Margeaux lay naked in the mud on the floor of the darkened shack.
Penelope stepped back, startled. But she did not look away, and she instantly moved forward again, stepping into the small structure.
Mother Margeaux lay curled in a modified fetal position, her face contorted in agony. Her body was bloated, nearly bursting, the filthy skin stretched taut over a fat face, overstuffed arms, enormous legs, grossly distended abdomen. She screamed, straightened, thrusting bloody hips into the air, then slumped back, the scream turning into manic laughter.
'Mother?' Penelope whispered.
Mother Margeaux stopped laughing. She looked up, smiled slyly, knowingly. 'It's Zeus. He's growing inside me.'
Penelope froze, cold washing over her. She knew instantly what had happened. She had not been willing to mate with Dionysus and give birth to the other gods--so her mother had offered herself to Dionysus instead.
But Penelope could tell by looking at her mother that it had not worked.
Mother Margeaux was pregnant, but she would not give birth to a god. She was not able to.
And the pregnancy was killing her.
Her mother laughed again, wildly. She reached behind her, into the shadows, and drew out a wineskin, holding it above her face and letting the red liquid squirt into her mouth. 'God, what a cock he has!'
Penelope took another step into the room. Her head was buzzing, although she didn't know if it was from the wine or the stress. A ray of sunlight streamed in as she moved out of the doorframe, and for the first time she saw why her mother's thighs were bloody.
There was a huge hole torn between her legs.
She'd been split open.
Inside the hole something white and slimy moved| squirmed.
Kevin pushed past her, screwdriver raised, but Penelf ope held him back.
'Don't,' she said.
'But she's--'
'She's dying.'
'She's giving birth!'
Penelope's head was pounding. She smelled bloody tasted wine, and she wanted to fuck, wanted to kill. She imagined jumping on her mother, digging her nails her mother's skin, biting her flesh, ripping out her he She closed her eyes. No. She couldn't give in. She ha to save it for Dionysus.
'I had him before you did!' Mother Margeaux cackle 'Even if you fuck him, I had him first! And I'm carrying his baby! I'm carrying his father! I'm carrying Zeus!'
Penelope held on to Kevin's arm, pulled him out of I hut. 'Leave her.'
'I'll kill her if you can't.'
'She'll die anyway.'
'She might not.'
He was right, she realized. As uncaring as she want to be, as dispassionate as she'd been about April's pron ise to kill her mothers, as sick and empty as she felt about Mother Felice, she could not bear to see Mother Ma geaux die. As an idea, as a concept, she could deal witi it, but seeing her mother here, she felt her pain. She stij retained feelings for her, and that was why she was equ' vocating, rationalizing, stalling.
Silently, she let go of Kevin's arm.
She stared at the ground as he walked back into the ha part of her thought that her mother would rip him ap No matter how sick and hurt she was, she was a nad. He was a high school kid. But Penelope would go in there, would not help him. Whatever happened pened. It was out of her hands.
Then she heard her mother screaming. There was laughter this time, only pain, and there was another low sound, a deep, wet gurgling.
Zeus?
A moment later, a hand touched her shoulder, a bloody hand that felt warm and sticky on her skin, and she saw Kevin. His face was white, blanched. He had left his screwdriver behind.
She said nothing, he said nothing, but the two of them walked through the circle of huts, peeking inside the other structures, seeing only mud and blood and bones. The other structures were empty.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, tried to stop the pounding in her skull.
It hadn't worked.
That's what struck her most about it all. It hadn't worked. Dionysus had returned, but he wasn't Dionysus anymore. He was this ... half god. He was there, in that body, but Dion was too. The old gods might have planned to be resurrected, but they had not been able to see into the future and had not foreseen what this world would be like.
Their plan had failed.
And Holbrook and his fellow keepers of the flame had turned out to be little more than glorified pen pals, not the guardians of the earth they obviously aspired to be. They might have been the first to understand what was going on, but they'd had no idea how to stop it.
Wasn't that always the way of it, though? So-called experts planned for emergencies and convinced themselves and everyone else that they were prepared for any contingency, yet when something happened, they were inevitably shoved into the background by some nobody who rose to the occasion.
Like her.
Although she wasn't exactly a nobody. She was involved. A minor player perhaps, but a player nonetheless.
And now it was up to her to finish this off.
She opened her eyes, glanced around. Where was Dionysus? He didn't seem to be here. Had he gone back down to the valley? Her eyes searched the perimeter of the lake.
Nothing.
She moved forward, past the last hut.
And there he was.
He lay passed out on the ground, nearly hidden in trees that bordered the shoreline, his feet protruding tween two bushes that were half normal and half alter their transformation obviously halted in midstream.
